Hi, I was given the following instruction to convert an MKV file to AVI (Fedora 14):

mencoder abc.mkv -oac pcm -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=886 -sub ITC0101.srt -subfont-text-scale 3 -o zzz.avi

When I plug this file into my DVD player the TV plays the audio but no video. If I play the file on my PC with mplayer it looks fine.

The DVD player has, so far, experienced no problems with xvid/avi files. Any suggestions where my video went? The mkv file was from an hdtv feed. My TV is not.

I had similar problem with similar files before and I think I didn't encode it compabile with hd players. I digged internet and found a interactice shell script for doing all the hard parts for me. It's xvidenc.

I runs it like this;
-2p tells it to do two pass encode and hwsdpal tells it to use Stand-alone HW compatible SD preset (It has several presets for easy configuration. You can seem them with xvidenc -help). After you run the script, just follow the instructions on the terminal and it will do the encoding. You can see the MEcoder command before it runs MEncoder as well. Maybe YOu can use it as a reference.

1 members found this post helpful.

thanks. I have downloaded xvidenc.I got a mencoder error first time around - incorrect resolution. I don't have time to look further tonight. I'll try again tomorrow night

Resolution settings has bad defaults.

I use ffmpeg, it works better, try:

adjust parameters.

I wrote a short guide:
http://draconishinobi.50webs.com/linux/encoding.html

2 members found this post helpful.

thanks the TexMex solution worked just fine